samfw

Halfway through the MBA - why an MBA?

2009-06-13T18:50:00.011-04:00

I've been working towards my MBA at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for almost a year now. My timing was characteristically bad, since Lisa was three years into a four year residency program at the time I started. Now she's wrapping up and moving up to Boston for the next exciting phase of her career - an Gyn/Oncology fellowship at Harvard - and I've got (I get?) to stay down here for a year to finish up.

It's been 10 years this month since I graduated from Middlebury college. In that time I have considered many graduate programs - from an MFA program, to a Masters of Education program, to a Masters of Social Work. I've come very close to starting grad school many times, but always changed my mind at the last minute. I never would have thought business school would be the ultimate winner. So, why am I doing this, especially at a time when the idea of the MBA is under attack by many as a cause of the current financial crisis?

To me, business school is not about learning how to make money. Business school is about learning how to create change by communicating with people effectively, in the medium that our country - and much of the world - operates under and depends on. When I think of "communication" I think broadly - communication is self-awareness, influence, motivation, collaboration. It's about seeing the big picture while being able to implement on a practical level, while working with diverse groups of people who have divergent interests.

As Peter Drucker said, close to his death at age 95, "I helped a few good people be effective in doing the right things" (source). To me, this is the core of the issue. Business school is teaching me how to be effective in doing the right things. We all have our own ideas about what the right things are, of course, and questions around what those things are, I believe, are the heart of the controversy over the MBA. From my experience at UNC, I would say that a majority of my classmates and professors are clearly focused on discussing the issues currently infecting business and the economy with an objective eye towards the kinds of behaviors that brought us here.

Does the MBA have real value? For me, there is no question. I could not nearly as effective in my current position if I was not in this program, and before this year I really had only a vague idea of how I might go about accomplishing some of my personal goals (more on that later). So, at the halfway point, having been submersed in topics I never thought I would find interesting, I'm very pleased with my decision to do the MBA, and to do it at UNC. I'll be happy when it's over, sure, but I believe the value is in the experience, more than in the credential that follows.

Open Source and Sustainability

2008-11-15T07:24:00.002-05:00

I work for an open source software company and have spent much of the past several years submersed in the ins and outs of how open source works from the perspective of software development, sales and support. Recently I've been hearing people engaged with sustainability in business talk about open source in the context of what they are doing.

Sustainability, like open source, has become a buzz word that means different things to different people. My definition: sustainable businesses are those that are actively incorporating social and environmental responsibility (in addition to economic responsibility) into their core operations and strategy. In business school the first thing they teach you is that the only purpose of business is to make profits. That's not good enough anymore - profits are now one of three core elements that need vigilant attention (social and environmental responsibility being the other two).

Yesterday I was at a conference of local business leaders discussing sustainability. I was surprised to hear one participant, Rob Rolfsen, Director of Sustainable Development for Cisco Systems, discuss a simple database tool his team developed to track the energy usage of all of Cisco's real estate properties. He developed the tool in MS Access, a proprietary platform, but he found that every time he showed the tool to colleagues in other businesses, they wanted a copy. So he now treats it like an open source project, even though it is built on a proprietary platform. He freely gives it to anyone who wants it, if they agree to share any improvements they make with him and other users. Interestingly, he did not use the phrase “open source” to describe this project.

What struck me about this story was the natural relationship between sustainability and open source. Sustainability works best when you have an open community of participants who are all helping each other improve to achieve a common goal. And everybody “wins” in a business sense – because if your company can cut energy use it will see immediate financial savings. Rob Rolfsen doesn't care about the tool he developed from a software perspective – it's just a tool to help him find ways to lessen Cisco's environmental impact. If other people want it – great. In the end, Rob will benefit from incorporating improvements other make.

The concepts of social and environmental responsibility share many qualities with the concepts of open source:

Community: Contribute too, help develop, and be a part of your community of customers and colleagues. Even competitors can benefit from cooperating in an open exchange of ideas in this space
Transparency: show customers what you are doing, how you are doing it and why. Companies are now releasing CSR reports with their annual reports. Getting this information out there in itself encourages improvement.
Open Standards: foster wider and more consistent adoption of your product or service by adhering to - or creating - standards that do not depend on proprietary formats, structures or secrets. Companies wont benefit from creating their own benchmarks and then meeting or surpassing them. The benefit comes from what they actually achieve not what they say they achieved.

Some interesting examples of sustainability and open source intersecting (please add more if you have them):

Michael Tiemann got me thinking about this with his blog post: Open source and sustainability: http://opensource.org/node/342

A conference happened in San Francisco in October on this topic: http://www.opensustainabilitynetwork.org/

Green Building Council promises open source sustainability code:
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2221545/green-building-council-promises "The UK's Green Building Council (GBC) has today announced plans to help address the confusion arising from the myriad of different green building standards through a new Code for Sustainable Buildings, designed to underpin various consultancies and standard bodies own green building guidelines... the new code would be fully open source, allowing various standard bodies, building firms and consultancies to use elements of the code in their own green building guidelines."

Open Source car:
http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/articles/05-06-06
"Of course a prodigious rate of innovation is required. Hitherto we have encouraged this through intellectual property rights, which harness the efforts of innovators, for the good of all, by granting a monopoly. But is this the best way? The example of Linux software would suggest not. The "Open Source" philosophy can incentivise a community to innovate for the good of all without restricting access to the output. The rate of progress is higher, the technology can spread more rapidly and the benefits are more equitably distributed."

Custom Kernel documentation updated

2007-11-18T06:56:00.000-05:00

As several people have noticed, there were quite a few changes to the kernel spec file with the release of Fedora 8. The custom kernel document has now been updated to reflect these changes. It worksforme, but as always further testing and comments are more than welcome. Thanks to everyone who has helped with the doc so far!

updated: custom kernel doc

2007-08-12T20:40:00.000-04:00

The custom kernel documentation has been updated. Thanks to those who tested the doc and filed bugs. Resolved are outstanding bugs and added are details about the new spec file features. Kernel building is now easier with added "--with" and "--without" flags to specify which kernels to build.

Details here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/CustomKernel

More needed: the building modules only section needs help. If you are experienced wiith building modules without building the whole kernel, take a look and shoot me an email with ideas on improving/expanding this section.

More changes are coming - look for changes in the spec file name and changes in kernel version structure coming soon.

comparing LVM2 to VxVM

2007-06-22T07:41:00.000-04:00

A lot of people are using Veritas volume manager on Linux. A lot of people also are moving from VxVM to the native LVM2 tools in Linux. I have put together a simple table showing the equivalent LVM2 commands to their VxVM counterparts. In doing this I should point out that I know a lot more about LVM2 than I know about VxVM, so I'm sure I am leaving out a lot of the Veritas stuff. But, this doc should give a good overview of how to accomplish the same things in either tool:

http://people.redhat.com/sfolkwil/lvm_vxvm.txt

Also if you are learning LVM2 Red Hat has published a new, very nice, comprehensive guide. Available here.

Custom Kernels in Fedora

2007-06-22T07:33:00.000-04:00

When Fedora moved to the 2.6 kernel years ago some instructions on how to build the kernel from the source RPM were added to the release notes. And there they stayed for years, largely untouched. For the Fedora 7 release notes I moved those instructions to a new document, and worked with the folks on fedora-kernel-list to refine the instructions. This effort is here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/CustomKernel

Still, the instructions were not perfect. As witnessed by this bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=240878

I'm making changes and improvements to the doc as I have time. If you are someone who regularly rebuilds your kernel or partakes in kernel development, please take a look at the instructions and chime in. Leaving a comment in the bugzilla is the best way to go for now.

The document is in the formal docs area of the Fedora wiki, and thus not editable by everyone. The intention here is to have subject matter experts make sure changes are sane before going live. The intention is not to make it hard to update the doc. Please don't hesitate to file a BZ, add to the current BZ, or just email me if you have any suggestions.

Fedora 7 - fast user switching

2007-03-03T14:34:00.000-05:00

Playing around with F7 in a virtual guest - I very much like this OS X-style feature:

I'm not going to swear it actually /works/ as of yet - but this is something I think is excellent for family room/shared machines... Glad to see yet another smart and simple feature being added to Gnome.

cloning a xen guest - clarification

2007-03-02T11:17:00.000-05:00

In my SCALE talk I mentioned that you can clone a Xen guest as follows:

- Copy the disk (I think the best way to to make the disk it's own logical volume, then take a snapshot of that LV)
- Copy the config file (and change the needed settings!)
- Boot up the new guest!

Someone in the audience said that this could not be done without shutting down the guest OS. It turns out that is not true - you can do it while the guest is up and running. The fact that the FS is journal ed will prevent data corruption and buffer/cache issues. And, the guest can't write to the snapshot from the moment it is taken.

This is good news and makes cloning a guest even easier...

SCALE 5x day 1

2007-02-11T08:29:00.000-05:00

The first day of SCALE was pretty great. The turnout was awesome and there were some great exhibitors. Manning the Red Hat booth all day I didn't get much of a chance to look around, and I was not able to attend any sessions (which was a bummer). My talk on Virtualization in RHEL 5 and FC6 was extremely well attended (people sitting in the aisles and standing all over the place - some people couldn't get in). I think the talk went well and I got a lot of good feedback. Slides here.

A couple of questions people asked me that I have since found the answers to:

* Per a limitation in Xen, Xen guests have no support for USB at all. Many people wondered how guest domains would handle a USB thumbdrive. Short answer: they wont.
* Many people asked about a bug in SUSE's Xen implementation that involves installs of Windows guests freezing halfway through. We had some great hardware and the Dell booth and tested this out - we were able to install a Windows Server 2003 guest with no problems. There is a trick that involves pressing F5 during the initial phase of the windows installer... will post details later.

It was a lot of fun hanging out at the booth. Tons of people came by, most with technical questions. Several people also had questions about pricing, which I couldn't really answer. I did find a bit of confusion about RHEL vs. Fedora and some ignorance about Red Hat's attitude about open source. Hopefully I was able to clear some of that up and thanks to everyone who asked tough questions.

My only wish is that we were closer to the Fedora booth. Thomas Chung was manning that one on the furthest other side of the exhibition hall. I think this gave the impression that Red Hat didn't really care much about Fedora, which couldn't be further from the truth. Hopefully next year we can have one big booth rather than two separate booths. I think it was more of a mix up than anything else.

Another day of manning the booth today...

Speaking at SCALE on 2/10-11

2007-01-07T18:31:00.000-05:00

I'll be presenting on Virtualization in FC6 and RHEL 5 at the Southern Cal Linux Expo (SCALE) in LA on Feb 10/11:

http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale5x/

The talk will be as much detail as I can get into 45 mins, focusing on the virt implementation in FC6/RHEL5 (virt-manager, virsh, Xen). I know this is a popular topic so I'm hoping to skip the obvious stuff and get right to the points of confusion and detailed how-to. The target audience is sysadmins (rather than, say, developers or non-technical managers)...

Any suggestions for topics that I should include, please comment!

Current outline looks like this:

Brief intro (why virtualize, etc, etc - very brief)
Hardware notes (Vanderpool/Pacifica)
State of things in RHEL 5/FC 6
- libvirt API
- virsh
- virt-manager
- Xen 3.0.x
How To:
- Clone on a domain (lvm snapshot)
- Start a domain (can't use virt-manager or virsh yet so this isn't as obvious as it sounds)
- Migrate a domain (not sure if I will be able to demo this, depends on lab equip available)
- Change hardware details (definitely demo this - also mention limitations)
FAQ
More stuff to learn (Cobbler and Koan, GFS/Cluster Suite)
Q and A

Linux Journal Weekly Newsletter

2006-12-06T16:21:00.000-05:00

http://lists.ssc.com/pipermail/lj-announce/2006-December/000098.html

I'm "Sam in North Carolina" in this week's LJ newsletter. Free t-shirt! I like sharing tips.

2 great Google firefox extensions

2006-11-24T15:13:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how far behind the times I am, but I just discovered 2 really amazing and useful Firefox extensions from Google. They have 2 others, 1 of which I think is neat and 1 of which I'm not really interested in.

The two that impress me are Notebook and Google Sync. Both take advantage of your gmail account to store information on google's servers. The Notebook extension allows you to save a note on any web page you are visiting. Highlight some text, right click and select "Note This" and the text you highlighted gets saved as a note with the link in the notebook. There are so many times when I want to make a note of a page I'm on. I either don't, and forget about it. Or, I bookmark it and never look at it again. This is like a bookmark where you can remind yourself why you are bookmarking it. The really cool thing is that since it uses Google's servers to store the info, you can check it from any computer. This leads to the functionality of Google Sync - this one saves your history, cookies, saved passwords and bookmarks (encrypted) on google's servers. It syncs all these settings from as many computers as you have the extension installed on. Finally, I can bookmark something at home and have it show up at work... This is really cool.

The other extension is more midly interesting - it shows you any blog entries that link to the page you are currently viewing.

mutt for fc6

2006-11-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

I rebuilt the mutt package with header cache and other goodies for FC6 this morning. I'm sure other people have already done this, but here is mine:

http://people.redhat.com/sfolkwil/rpms/mutt-1.5.12-1.i386.rpm

factFEST 2006

2006-11-19T10:30:00.000-05:00

Last night I did my first presentation as a Fedora Ambassador. The event was a first annual free software fest at SUNY Farmingdale, about 30 miles from NYC on the LIRR. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the event ended being a very cool mix of people with free software interests engaging in a lively discussion.

First I did a presentation on Xen. I was scheduled to give a talk on Gnome afterwords, but that and every other talk was canceled. The event planners decided at the last minute that there wasn't enough mass in the audience to have multiple talks in different rooms. Instead, the speakers were invited to have an impromptu panel discussion with the audience. Four of us got on stage. Ian Turner from the Amanda project (and from the company Zmanda that provides commercial support for Amanda), Nate Eckenrode from the Ubuntu community, and Mark Drago - the VP of the local LUG.

The discussion centered around the synergies and conflicts of open source software and commercial companies. There was general agreement that providing commercial support for open source projects was great for business and for open source. There were a lot of questions about the recent Microsoft/Novel deal which nicely demonstrated the confusion around this deal and the unfavorable response from the community. There was also a lot of discussion about the GPL, which gave the panel a chance to educate folks about what the GPL is and why companies like Microsoft will not be able to sue open source out of existence.

All in all I had a great time and was impressed by the spirit of mutual respect and support between folks who happen to be active different open source communities (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse). Ubuntu fans said nice things about Red Hat as a company and Fedora as a distro, and the feeling was very mutual.

Because I work for Red Hat a lot of folks assume that I _represent_ Red Hat, which could not be further from the truth. I participate in Fedora (like other Red Hatters) completely outside of my day job - something that also seemed to surprise a few folks. It sounds like a disclaimer when I say this, but it's an important distinction to make. No, I don't have any inside info about Oracle! Though I did have a good chuckle when I saw a full page ad for Unbreakable Linux on the back cover of the Economist. Sigh... For people who ask my opinion on the subject (as many did last night) it is this: I'm not worried.

Anyway, hats off to John Teddy for inaugurating an event which I'm sure will get bigger and better each year.

speaking at FactFEST in Long Island on 11/17

2006-11-03T07:11:00.000-05:00

I will be giving a talk or two at a Free/Libre conference in Long Island (Farmingdale State - about an hour from Penn Station on the LIRR). This is my first event as a Fedora Ambassador. I'll do one talk about the Gnome desktop in FC6 and another on Xen. If you are in the area, come by. Should be fun and I'll have Fedora goodies to give away.

halfway through the Performance Summit

2006-10-11T21:27:00.000-04:00

This week I have been in the Westford office of Red Hat in a seminar style class focused on performance tuning. We are spending time with an impressive lineup of engineers: Larry Woodman on kernel performance tuning, John "shak" Shakshober on benchmarks, Steve Dickson on NFS, and Will Cohen on oprofile and systemtap. This is a pretty intense week with lots of very smart people giving 12 lucky support engineers a /lot/ of material to work with. I'm taking notes, which I will probably try to break down into short digestible how-to articles or knowledgebase entries. But, in the meantime, most of these guys have some great articles available on the web:

Shak on choosing a scheduler

Will Cohen on using oprilie to analyze a package build

Will on systemtap

Challenge of Ogg

2006-10-04T09:50:00.000-04:00

I have started to observe a pretty major blocker in encourage others to move to ogg, or to keep their Fedora installs mp3-free. That is streaming audio on-line. I have found that the vast majority of on-line audio is offered only in mp3, Real and Windows Media formats. I'm not just talking music - my primary on-line listening is various NPR stations and shows. I have written a few such stations to ask them if they would consider offering an Ogg stream (icecast). The advantages are clear:

- It's free (as in beer) for both the organization and the user
- No patent issues
- Can save bandwidth by offering better compression

The responses I'm getting though indicate that there aren't enough Ogg users to justify any time or investment in setting up an Ogg stream. So, *this* to me is an opportunity. We need to demonstrate to content providers that there *is* an audience that would rather use Ogg were it available, or that only use Ogg and therefore don't listen to non-Ogg streams.

I'm trying to think how best to accomplish this. I imagine it will involve rallying people to either sign a petition or send a letter, one content provider at a time...

Playing with Xen in FC6T3

2006-10-01T06:33:00.000-04:00

Fedora Rawhide (post T3) is getting incredibly stable and awesome. I'm very excited for this release, in large part of the maturing of Xen. The big attraction for many users will be virt-manager, the VMware-like GUI that includes a graphical frame buffer for Xen guests. I have had trouble getting things working with earlier FC6 tests, but I'm happy to say now that everything is going quite well with paravirtualization in the latest rawhide. I'm posting some screen shots of the virt-manager in action.

In the first shot, you can see the serial console view, as well as the "details" view in the background. The serial console is excellent because if there is something wrong with the graphical display (or something horribly wrong like a kernel panic) you can use the serial console to connect and get debugging information.

In the details view you can see (and modify!) things like amount of RAM allocated to the guest, number of cpus, etc. You can also see network information:

In this shot we see the installer in action, with the status view in the background. The status view is the main virt-manager window which shows CPU and memory stats for the running VMs (including the host). Note that the frame buffer starts up automatically when the installer starts - no need to fuss with VNC. This is a truly seamless (and pleasant) experience:

Moving to Ogg

2006-09-29T18:46:00.000-04:00

One of the biggest "hot topics" in the Fedora community (read: subject of flame wars) is the MP3 question. Fedora can't play MP3s out of the box. No, it isn't broken. Yes, it's intentional. Bottom line, in the US distributing MP3 software without paying a hefty license to the company that owns the patent, is illegal. Beyond that, the format is not only closed source but has a very strict license. In other words, it's the oposite of what much of open source stands for. So, say the "true" open source advocates, stop using MP3!

However, *not* using MP3 is very hard. Like many people, I ripped all my CDs to MP3s 6 or 7 years ago, long before I knew anything about open source. Re-ripping all those CDs to a different format would be a pain in the ass to say the least. Also like many people, I acquired MP3s via means that make impossible to "re-rip" them in a different format. There are MP3-->Ogg conversion utilities out there, but from what I hear they come at a quality cost during conversion (I don't know for sure that this is true).

So, for years I have added MP3 support to Fedora by installing so-called "dirty" codecs. Well, not any more. I've decided to switch to Ogg despite the obstacles. The more I read about Ogg the more I think it is a better format. Not only in terms of its kosher license, but in terms of audio quality as well. Right now "ogg" is the odd man out in the codec world. But, like all things Open Source, the more people who use it (and DEMAND it) the wider its adoption will become, and the more Ogg-friendly content providers there shall be.

So, I'm doing it. I'm going to go through the hassle of re-ripping hundreds of CDs, converting mp3s that I can't re-rip, and generally avoiding Mp3 at all costs. We'll see how it goes...

will you fix my PC

2006-09-24T11:56:00.000-04:00

Like many people in the tech business I get a lot of friends, friends of friends, and (mostly) co-workers of Lisa asking if I can come "fix their computer". When I ask what's wrong with it the answer is always the same:

It's slower than it used to be

I think I have a virus

I have all these popup windows and programs I don't want slowing down my computer

Well, yes I can fix your PC. The only real way to fix it, is to re-install. And when we reinstall we are going to install Fedora instead of Windows. I promise you won't notice much difference except:

You will be able to more easily and reliably use your computer for the simple things you need to do - email, web browsing, and the occasional spreadsheet or word document.

You wont ever have to worry about virus scans and spyware

You will discover a lot of cool things to do with your computer that you never thought about before...

And, of course, you won't have to worry about paying someone to come "fix your computer" every year or so.

syncing Treo with Evolution in FC6

2006-09-22T13:45:00.000-04:00

So, at work I have had to make the move from mutt back to evolution. The reason was the calendar. I have so many clients and co-workers now scheduling meetings with me via iCal email invitations, that I came to the realization that I needed to have an integrated email/calendar solution. Thunderbird I have never really liked, and the lack of calendar makes have no advantage over mutt.

In FC6 Beta, evolution has some major improvements. It no longer feels to me like the bulky overbloated buggy monster that a lot of people think it is. In fact, it's extremely slick, highly functional and has already proved very useful to me.

Icing on the cake! Hook up your palm, click on Edit-->Synchronization Options. Walk through the wizard to configure the device. Then just hit the hot synch button at any time... and boom. Everything will synch!

For people who have not been using linux exclusively for the past few years, this might seem trivial. But for me, it's HUGE. I'm so excited.

FC6 improved printing support in action

2006-09-10T16:41:00.000-04:00

Many users will love this... After installing FC6 Test 2, when I logged in for the first time to Gnome I was greeted by a printer configuration dialog. My Ethernet connected printer was auto-detected (even though it was off at the time!). The dialog correctly chose the driver and simply asked me to confirm.

A huge step forward! Though it seems small, in the past it was quite arduous to get a printer hooked up, and you had to have the root password to do it.

Read more here: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/022aug06/features/fc6_print/

Lost my nerve... literally

2006-09-10T16:36:00.000-04:00

Turns out with my recent dishwashing mishap I either severed, bruised or otherwise damaged the nerves in my thumb. It's a pretty strange sensation. The top part of my thumb is all numb, though I can still move it fine (Lisa says this is definitely a good sign). Every once in a while this incredible burning sensation shoots through my thumb. It's unlike anything I have ever felt before. It's painful, but it's not like any pain I really recognize. I kind of feels like boiling water is injected into my thumb for just a second then it's gone. In any case it's definitely unpleasant. Lisa says this will continue happening for months until the nerve has fully repaired itself...

sutures and Vicoden

2006-09-05T21:59:00.000-04:00

I may take a picture of this later for fun, but tonight I did possibly the stupidest thing I've done in recent memory. Whilst washing dishes -- actually just a dish -- I somehow ended up with a very large, very deep gash just next to the knuckle on my thumb. I have never seen so much blood come out of my body. I drove to urgent care and got 6 stitches. And it's still bleeding. When I saw the doctor putting in the sutures I almost fainted. The only logical conclusion I can draw from this experience is that I am never, ever doing dishes again.

The most important reason to use OpenOffice

2006-09-05T21:53:00.000-04:00

http://www.odfalliance.org/

The Open Document Format. Proprietary document formats do a lot more than annoy open source advocates like me. They also contribute to major problems in accessing, sharing and archiving electronic records. If more governments, institutions and business don't start mandating ODF, things will get pretty ugly pretty quick.

And, Google is now part of the ODF alliance!

I thought only men did this sort of thing

2006-08-29T16:11:00.000-04:00

The other day I was running my "old stand-by" (three miles around the paths in the woods of our neighborhood) when I sighted an interesting phenomena. There were two ladies about 100 yards in front of me. Yeah, I was catching up to them. When I was about 50 yards behind one of them broke with the other and ran to the woods by the trail. The other started walking. A few moments later I was caught up to them. The woman who had darted for the woods jumped up, having been squatting, and quickly pulled her pants up. Peeing! She was peeing! Right there by the side of the path... I held my hand up to my face and shouted "I'm not looking I'm not looking!" and kept running...

Photos of the new floors

2006-08-29T16:06:00.000-04:00

We are just about done with 2 weeks of labor and the floors (I think) turned out OK:

http://predisposition.com/lisa/main.php?g2_itemId=866

Amazing bling finally arrives on Fedora

2006-08-21T20:26:00.000-04:00

For those of us who, despite the fact that it has almost no (ok, none at all) practical implications, are droolingly attracted to insane desktop visual afffects, we now have some stuff that even out does OS X with its visual impressiveness.

Gnome has always touted itself as having "attractive usability". Sometimes, though, the definition of "attractive" was quite subjective. Now, though, we see the maturing gnome desktop truly finding away of incorporating incredible beauty to the desktop without sacrificing usability or imposing anything on users who'd rather not have it.

Starting with FC6 Test 2 you can enable these visual effects with incredible ease. First, installcompiz:

yum install compiz

Then go to System-->Preferences-->Desktop Effects and enable the desktop effects. Note that this menu feature is new to compiz as of a couple days ago. Then, it will either work and you will be totally amazed, or nothing will happen, or your screen will explode. If it doesn't work, just restart X to get your old desktop back.

So what kind of effects are we talking about? The ones I like the best are subtle. When you close a window, for example, it quickly fades out instead of just disappearing or collapsing. Likewise, when you launch a program it sort of gently fades in. When you switch to a virtual desktop you get the osx style cube rotation, but with added motion effects. The most garish is when you move any window it jiggles slightly in response to how fast you move it.

Whether it works or not is largely dependent on your video card. Basically if you have an Nvidia card you are out of luck because Nvidia does not allow the open source community to develop drivers that work. If you have a radeon 7000-9250 you should be in good shape. Many intels work as well. For a more comprehensive list of cards and some detailed instructions, see the wiki page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx

2006-08-18T14:29:00.000-04:00

Playing with Writely! I've been waiting for this for quite some time. A full featured word processor inside a web browser. You can save to your desktop on odt, word, rtf or pdf formats. You can open documents from your desktop as well. And you can publish directly to your blog, or you can publish to writely.com and send the link to others. You can also collaborate. This is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen in a while. With stuff like this, especially when everyone adopts the Open Document Format, we will truly have seamless sharing of editable documents. Pretty neat.

LVM with dm-multipathing notes

2006-08-02T07:29:00.000-04:00

One point of confusion when you have multiple nodes connecting to shared storage with MPIO and cLVM (for use with GFS, let's say) is how the nodes see the luns.

For example, let's say you have three nodes with UUIDs 123, 456 and 789 (simplified numbers for clarity). On node one your dm device name-->UUID mapping looks like this:

123 --> dm-2
456 --> dm-3
789 --> dm-4

But on node 2 it looks like this:

123 --> dm-1
456 --> dm-2
789 --> dm-3

You might think that this is a problem - if you make a filesystem on dm-1 on node 2, how can it be accessed from node 1? If you make a filesystem on dm-2 on node 1, will it get confused with dm-1 on node 2?

This is exactly the abstraction layer that LVM provides in this situation. Once you make the volume on the dm device LVM takes care of mapping it to the proper device no matter what the dm-# is. Just create the LVM/filesystem on one node and both will see it. You can then ignore the dm-#s.

GSO = Not worth it

2006-08-02T06:37:00.000-04:00

Had a great trip in San Fran this weekend, but it's definitely not worth it to save $200 by flying out of GSO (1.25 hours away).

- Got up at 3:00 AM to make it my 6:00 AM flight
- Got to airport on time, but was told flight was delayed by 30 mins due to "crew rest" and I would miss my connection to CLT
- GSO moved me from the 6:00 AM to the 7:20 to CLT and onto a later flight to San Fran. Only, they didn't tell me they did this and they gave me a bording pass for the 6:00 AM
- I fly to CLT on the 6:00 AM in time for the connection. There is room on the plane but due to my baggage being booked for the next flight I can't board. I have to wait for the next flight...
- Show up at 9:00 PM on Monday night for the red eye back to CLT. I am told that because I "missed by 7:20 flight" out of GSO to CLT on the way out, they cancelled my whole trip. I explained I was never on that flight. Doesn't matter. I explained that if I missed the flight I couldn't be here in San Fran now. Didn't matter. My reservation was lost and the flight was full....

Luckily I got the last stand by seat, but was a little close for comfort...

flying to paris

2006-07-26T06:06:00.000-04:00

I've had this dream several times lately that I'm flying to Paris. It's not a dream about Paris, or going to Paris, but just about catching a flight to Paris. It's an anxiety dream, perhaps because I'm traveling a lot this month (Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Francisco and NYC). Last night was typical -- I had this itinerary that was a little convoluted. Then I forgot to bring the itinerary with me. The airport is in a big city that I'm not familiar with, and for some reason I decide to *walk* there. So, I'm walking from this big city to this big airport, like in the fields next to the highway and of course there are no walking paths to the airport so I'm jumping fences and stuff. I'm a tad concerned I'm not going to make it and at one point I ask myself "Why did I decide to walk?". No reason, of course, other than for the exercise. I finally get near the airport, at which point I decide to wait for the park and ride shuttle. I'm like a couple hundred yards away, having walked 10 miles, and now I decide to wait for the shuttle. So I wait, and wait. Finally the Shuttle comes but it's full. So I have to wait for the next one. Eventually I get on, then realize I left my jacket on the bench. So I ponder riding the shuttle all the way around its loop so I can jump off and grab my jacket next time around. Regretfully, I decide to leave the jacket. But now I can't stop thinking about the jacket. In the airport, while I'm waiting, I think "I can go back and get it." Meanwhile I have no idea what time it is or what time my flight leaves. Actually, I have no idea what airline i'm taking. So I start to look for the ticketing counter and the gates. I can't find them. There are shops and arcades and restaurants in the airport, but there's no information boot and no signs for any gates or anything. Wait a minute! This isn't an airport! It's a shopping mall!... and on and on...

Willmington and Santa Fe

2006-07-26T05:29:00.000-04:00

Lisa and I spent another weekend in Wilmington, NC for my birthday. We really love this town, and it occurred to me it's partially because of how much it reminds me of Santa Fe... Both cities are extremely old and have lots of historic, beautiful architecture. They are both nestled into some wonderful natural beauty (mountains vs. ocean). They are both filled with a surprising number of creative people - lots of arts and culture happening for their size. And, interestingly, they both have a similar (unfortunate?) pattern of development. If you take a primary road out of the historic downtown - Cerillos in Santa Fe, Market St in Wilmington, you soon come across and endless see of Taco Bells, cheap motels, ugly strip malls and big box stores. Hmm... maybe that's just America in general, but in these two places the contrast is especially striking. Anyway, I'm already emailing with a Wilmington real estate agent (I have a habit of doing this). I will say Wilmington is a heck of a lot cheaper than Santa Fe...

30 up

2006-07-26T05:23:00.000-04:00

As of last Sunday I'm 30. Seems like a good time to take stock of my life. What have I done with the past 10 years (in order of importance)?

- Meet Lisa
- Meet lots of other great people too
- Found myself
- Improve relationship with family
- Graduate college
- Turn 21
- Live in 4 states
- Find several jobs I really liked
- Seemingly settle on a career
- Write 2 screenplays and a novel (none of which will ever be viewed by another living being)
- Buy a house
- Buy three cars (one at a time)

Hmm... I hope I think of some additional stuff...

rental cars

2006-07-16T20:32:00.000-04:00

Note to self: never ever make a reservation with a non-major rental car company ever again. I don't care how much cheaper it is. :(

The woman I have chosen not to make my wife

2006-07-10T21:00:00.000-04:00

Lisa and I just returned from another wedding. This is probably the 8th wedding we've been to as an un-married, un-engaged couple. As happens frequently at weddings, many people asked us when we were planning to have one ourselves. There are several possible responses to this question. Among them:

o I don't know -- have you set a date for your divorce yet?
o We haven't set a date yet, but as long as we are asking personal questions, when was the last time you had an orgasm?
o I don't know what you are talking about
o Lisa and I feel that we don't need to participate in an ancient pagan ritual in order to legitimize our love and the commitment we share

None of these, unfortunately, leave a very good impression. I usually suffice with a simple, "I don't know." It is endlessly fascinating to me, though, how thoughtlessly people ask such a personal question (implying judgment) of someone they don't know very well. The people who asked this question:

o The mother of the groom (also the mother of my girlfriend). This was understandable.
o The mother of the bride
o The brother of the mother of the groom's brother's wife
o The son of the boyfriend of the mother of the groom
o A complete stranger
o The mother of the best man

I am not really offended by any of this, though I think I probably should be. Part of my dislike for the institution of marriage is an understanding that many people believe it is somehow strange or abnormal to avoid it. Perhaps one reason we haven't gotten married is to spite all these people trying to pry into our deepest of personal decisions.

One of the more amusing things about living with someone for six years and not being engaged or betrothed to them is watching how other people introduce us. "This is Lisa's... friend" or "Special friend" or "Partner" or sometimes the obvious "boyfriend". Two new ones emerged on this trip that I particularly liked: "Sam is Lisa's beloved" and "Sam is the man Lisa has chosen not to make her husband". The latter will be how I handle this situation in future cases. The Al Gore-inspired phrase is clever, funny and a perfect fit.

So, when *are* Lisa and i getting married? Probably when we are ready. Which may be never.

Buffett and Abortion Rights

2006-06-27T07:24:00.000-04:00

I was surprise to hear on NPR this morning that Warren Buffet is a very large donor to organizations that support reproductive rights and family planning programs. These organizations include NARAL. Not only does he give, but he just gave $3 Billion dollars. Pretty amazing. Apparently he keeps it quiet. It's interesting that even when someone gives significantly to support this fundamental human right, that they don't want anyone to know about it...

a very long engagement

2006-06-24T06:40:00.000-04:00

I haven't wanted to write my comments about a movie in years. Well, since college really. But this film (Lisa and I watched it on DVD last night) was truly amazing. In traditional French fashion, a very complex story with many characters is held together by an omniscient narrator. Each scene is short, visually incredible, and emotionally restrained. The intense drama is revealed not through sweeping rushes of music or action-filled moments of real-time events, but rather through the unwinding plot that slowly builds, becoming more and more tragic along the way. In many ways it's more like reading a novel than watching a film, but that is part of its Frenchness. The experience is intensely filmic but not in the way American audiences are used to. Many important details, for example, are explained by the narrator or revealed in extremely brief moments of recollection. If you aren't paying close attention you will miss some crucial plot element. Many of the things I'm describing, I realize, are major turn-offs for most movie goers I know. Suffice to say, this is the first film I have seen in a while that made me remember why I wanted to be a film major. And also why I didn't want to make films of my own.

In terms of the actual content of the story, one thing that struck me were parallels between the Word War I scenes and many scenes from the news today. Without becoming a "war film", the film succinctly demonstrates the hopeless desperation that overcomes people in times of war, and leads them to do unthinkable things. The main plot of the movie centers around 5 French soliders who were court marshaled and condemned to death for war crimes. Their crime was to shoot their own hands off in an attempt to be sent home as wounded. The horrible action of war in the punishment, of course, not the crime. But the most revealing moments of how far people go under the duress of war are in the hearts and minds of those who carried out the sentence. And those who arrested the men for their "crimes" in the first place. And those who could have intervened to stop the execution but who did not. One moment in particular reminded me of some recent news stories - two enemy soldiers face each other and realize they have no reason to kill one another. A third soldier appears, scoffs at the moment of human hesitation, grabs the bayonet from the hand of one soldier and quickly stabs him with it.

There is no excuse for such behavior, but it is a fact of war. The only reason you engage in war is, ultimately, to convince people you are right by killing them. That's one thing that we as civilized people haven't been able to get past.

Mugshot... my 2 cents

2006-06-23T19:07:00.000-04:00

I was skeptical about Red Hat's new social networking widget thingy at first, but I have to say I am growing to like it. I now keep mugshot running all the time in the background. I would say about 90% of the time I ignore it. But, if I am not super busy, I find it quite interesting. For those who haven't tried it, here is the run down:

On the mugshot website you make your profile and can view, create and join groups of friends or people who have similar interests (like, the Fedora Users groups, for example). The client application is a small program that sits in your system tray. If you find a cool webpage, you can click a link to share it will a specific group or groups, or with the "world" in mugshot. When someone shares a link, the application opens a little bubble that tells you what the link is, who sent it, and how many other users are viewing it currently (and their names). If you follow the link, a mugshot frame appears around it, from there you can join a chat with other mugshot users viewing the link. The chat functionality comes from you existing instant messenger (like AIM). And of course the links use whatever web browser is your default.

There are other features -- like sharing music -- that I haven't paid much attention to. There are still other features coming (like a plug in for Flikr for example) that sound interesting. But I really like this basic idea. That you can instantly share a link with random strangers (or friends) and then engage whoever is interested in conversation. The conversation is brief, targeted, and often insightful. It's basically makes your web browsing experience a more public one. Instead of finding private amusement, or making a blog post, or sending an email that maybe no one will read, you quickly learn who cares about the link (because they clicked and wanted to join the chat) and what they think.

I see a lot of potential for this idea and look forward to the continued mugshot development (especially the growth in the user community).

English as the Official Language?

2006-05-19T07:55:00.000-04:00

When I was in 9th grade our Government class conducted a mock legislative session. We were all senators who had to introduce and vote on bills. The hard part for my 15 year old mind was thinking of something interesting to propose. I thought it was strange that in this country of English speakers we had no official language. So, I proposed a bill that would make English the official language of the United States. It seemed like a no-brainer and an easy win. Well, all my class mates quickly pointed out how narrow minded, exclusive, unnecessary and even hateful this idea was. They shot it down unanimously. And then I realized how right they were. Yes, English is doubtless the predominant language in this country, but to make it the official language would be needlessly exclusionary at best, and downright racist at worst. In fact, not having an official language is one of things that contributes to our country's amazing diversity and cultural richness.

Well, 15 years later the real-life senators are still struggling to understand what my 15 year old classmates already knew. This morning I wrote to both of my Republican senators urging them to change their minds. Please, don't let this bill pass.

Moving to blogger

2006-05-14T11:13:00.000-04:00

Due to various problems with maintaining my own blog, and the convenience of blogger.com, I will be migrating my blog over here. http://predisposition.com will shortly contain photos and other fun stuff. There is no import feature, so I will be migrating only the posts from predisposition that get the most hits.

I will also be using thew gnome blog poster utility to compose and post my entries, which is pretty sweet and included in fedora 5.

where is the download button?

2006-05-13T22:40:00.000-04:00

Reading on ars about a new feature in Word 2007 that allows you to make blog posts directly from word. A blog post from the lead programmer (mr. friend) talks about the new beta 2 release of word 2007. He provides a link for the site of this beta version. I naively clicked on it, thinking "yeah, I'll give that a try" . Of course there is no option to download the beta software, only glossy brochure type info about it and a price list. And, if there was a download link, I'd have to power up a VM session of Windows just to try it out. Yeah, prolly not worth it...

LVM in rescue mode

2005-12-17T18:46:00.000-05:00

I've had to deal with LVM in rescue mode a few times lately, which has given me some new insight into this stuff:

e2fsck:

Boot into rescue mode (in RHEL/Fedora this means putting in CD 1 and typing "linux rescue" at the boot prompt -- but it's essentially any minimal live CD). Rescue mode does not do anything with LVM by defualt: to activiate the volume groups, you need to issue these:
#lvm vgscan
#lvm vgchange -ay
#lvm lvs
lvs will simply display your volume group and logical volume names, use this output to issue the e2fsck command: e2fsck /dev/volumegroupname/logicalvolumename. Of course, pass what ever options ot e2fsck you normally would (like -y or -c).

Re-name the / volume group:

I never thought I'd have a legitimate reason to do this, until I found myself wanting to back up data from one disc (from a dead system) on to another system. I always choose the default names for VGs and LVs, so when I put my extra disc into my live system it choked finding two volume groups named "VolumeGroup00".

Take out that second disc, then boot into rescue mode (do not mount anything and do not run the lvm commands from the previous example):

#vgrename VolumeGroup00 newname

Where VolumeGroup00 is the old name, and "newname" is the newname. If this was not the root filesystem we would be done and could happily reboot as normal. But, since this IS the root file system, we need to remake the initial ramdisk first (if you don't have one of those, you're off the hook):

#mount /dev/newname/LogVol00 /mnt/sysimage
#mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sysimage/boot
#chroot /mnt/sysimage
#cp /boot/initrd-kernelversion.img /boot/kernelversion.img.old
#mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-kernelversion.img kernelversion

Don't forget to change all references to the old VG name. Typically this would be in grub.conf and fstab. After that, reboot with that second disc added and you should be fine